skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The conclusion is that they are useless, but this is predicated on a notion that there is some use to which they can be put. The "trend" therefore is not what matters - who cares if I can't find a hugely accurate rational form past what I couldn't remember anyway? What matters is those few near the start. He dismisses 22/7 as being no better than 3.14 because it only agrees in the same number of digits; it is in fact more accurate, and easier to use for some operations. 355/113 is not only easier to remember but also substantially more accurate than the decimal approximation with the same number of digits. Rarely will you need more accuracy than that in your head (or on your napkin). If you need more in your program, M_PI is also 4 characters...
11th-hour donation saves Hacker Dojo
Yes, this is exactly how I feel. The law was horrible, but it had a majority. The only explanation is that the legislators are voting about something they don't understand or are flat-out corrupt.

The fact that SOPA wasn't passed after Wikipedia closed down in protest doesn't comfort me, because they'll still attempt to and be able to pass increasingly restrictive laws. The entire internet won't rally against every one.
I wrote up a quick example using d3, adding some jitter to the graph line gives it the hand-drawn look, plus used a font from the xkcd forums

http://bl.ocks.org/3816112
Wow, this seems good. I've been using VideoJS for the last couple of months and the biggest problem with it is, that they do Classes, Events end everything themselves. The Components system is good though, but VideoJS needs some rewrite to use jQuery or Ender, or some libraries from microJS.com...
Use of a company name is not trademark infringement - trademarks indicate the origin of goods or services. Unless he's convincing anyone that what he's presenting is a service from Apple Computers then he's not infringing their trademark, wilfully or otherwise.

Moreover reading the page [as it was presented to me] shows he's clearly not intending to infringe the mark with the content of the website either. IIRC he makes it clear that he/the page doesn't have an association with Apple Computers.

If he puts up a porn site it will be even more obvious that he's not selling computers or consumer electronics. The actual ability to infringe Apple's marks would decrease hugely. Big name corps get special additional protections in some jurisdictions however that ignore things like the actualities of the situation.

If they sue him they'd probably win regardless of the spirit of the particular statutes that apply.

Do you think that these guys - http://www.usapple.org/ - are infringing Apple's trademarks too?
Google Maps website shows Samsung laptop running Apple OS X
True, but somehow I am more willing to rebind undo than insert; I am not sure this is logical. I also do like the h,ctrl-h and j,ctrl-j correspondences I mentioned - helps me remember the values in question when working with ascii (ctrl-a = 1, ctrl-b = 2, etc).

Of course, already having muscle memory for hjkl from vim, robots, hack, &c, I'm not rebinding anything standard - I find it valuable to be sufficiently at home on any system I am I find myself working on.
To put this gently:
You don't know what you are talking about.

Nothing here has anything to do with trademark infringement.
Period.
I started to write a longer post detailing all the legalities involved here, but it's simply not necessary.

Additionally, in every WIPO appeal i've been involved that bears any similarity to this case, where WIPO ruled in favor of the claimant, it was overturned on appeal to a court of competent jurisdiction.
Seems like a good time to switch to Usenet here then - not watertight but much less likely to get into trouble (at least I'm ready to try that theory). Anyone know a good Usenet provider for Japan based connections?
One of really serious the problems with SOAs is that you need to reinvent cross-database joins. The promise is that you will decouple the logical components of the application; but in practice some secret-handshake, outside-of-view coupling actually occurs so that you can meaningfully do ad hoc queries across the different services.

Similarly, for languages with strong typing, you partially give that facility up.
Nice work - it would be helpful, I think, if you could explain how these designs with with software that scans resumes for keywords, etc.
Hashtables are great until they grow to a significant fraction of available memory. Then there is no way to avoid the cost of rehashing or giving up constant time access - and if your program isn't using most of memory then you can run it on a smaller computer!
Yeah, fun idea.
So when I didn't recognize some of the options, I've looked them up with :help and of course "autoindent" and "ai" are the same, so should be really added together.
Maybe because scary things crawl out of dark holes? Because you can drop things into holes & not get them out? Because you can hurt your little finger putting it into holes where it doesn't belong? How about Flash Gordon's Trial by Treebeast?
I didn't do that myself but I think it's a very valid strategy. The only problem I can see is that it might hurt your momentum: sometimes you just need to go ahead and write without having to wait for feedback or A/B test results for every chapter.

Same with presales, it's a great strategy as long as you don't spend so much time promoting the pre-sale that you forget to write the book!

It might sound like I'm exaggerating but there is so much you can do to market eBooks that the book itself can sometimes become almost an afterthought…
I think the biggest lesson for me was that in programming things aren't necessarily there for a reason. Method and class names are arbitrary and part of the "creative" side of development. One of the best skills to learn is to read arbitrary code and be able to pull out the concepts and ignore the "design" on top.
I have been confused about that every, single, damn, time I've ever used Google OpenID, whether it was supporting it or using it. Thanks for opening my eyes.

I knew I liked BrowserID and you've pointed out around reason why.
Hey - just a quick note - As per your suggestion, I've added an export feature under the username drop down that spits out a quote-encapsulated CSV file.
Eric Hobsbawm, British Historian, Dies at 95
Agreed, I actually appreciate the grammar correction (to an extend) when someone corrects me, since I usually learn about something I was doing wrong.

However, it is annoying to read everyone else getting corrected. I'm not sure how to solve that, maybe an email? But that seems to be more effort than it is worth for the person correcting.

P.S. Since it's always an issue: Your email needs to be in the 'about' field for others to see it. If you want others on HN to be able to contact you please check it now.
Robotic Bees Using Artificial Intelligence May Pollinate Crops In The Future
Paul Erdős: N is a number - full documentary
Argh. Why am I so late to this thread?

This is possible. Your BrowserID provider can do public/private key auth. You could have an identity that is provided for (you could do this yourself on your own domain) that you authenticate to via a private key.

That's how flexible this protocol is. The provider has a huge range of discretion about how the account is authenticated.
Thanks for the reply, I did check my spam, nothing there. I have also emailed them. Fingers crossed :)
Two things:

1. I wish the author would define "market share" - is it % of users, percent of pageviews via that browser, or something else.

2. The adoption visualization really shows the difference between release strategies.
Looks good, I like how you added the style to the axis, nice touch. I did something similar but without the axis
> People are building Tor concepts, non-Zynga collaborative games, new messaging protocols, etc in App.net ... beyond twitter is easy.

I don't get it. What's the advantage of this over regular internet? You use someone else's servers?
That feeling of shipping really really helps you on the next task as well. Shipping a side project like this (nicely done btw!) is great motivation for any work you need to do too.
Meet the free software gang — Free Software Foundation
Password Managers, Sigh
Thank You. :-)
Except that oil prices have risen for everyone, regardless of currency.

Floating exchange rates tend to cancel out quantitative differences between currencies, so in fact some of the price rise you see is "real".

Gold is not a sensible measure of value because gold is not a currency. It is a metal with multiple competing uses, only one of which is as a store of value.
They'll still pick up the keywords since it's in .doc format. One trick for the scanning software is to hide keywords your resume in size 1 white font. :)
Cool idea! Demo didn't work for me on latest version of Chrome and a brand new MacBook Air though, and gave it a pretty good shot. I'm sure you didn't put this up without testing that it works, just didn't work after about 3-5 minutes of trying everything for me.
This a nice nifty script. Thanks!

Something I noticed (https://www.filepicker.io/pricing/):
Since filepicker.io charges by number of files and NOT by total size of files, a free account could potentially host a huge amount of data.

Eg: 5000 files, each of 1 GB = 5 TB!!!
You and the grant parent are arguing about a technicality.

"Oil prices being so high that oil cannot be used economically for anything" vs. "Actually running out of oil" would have the same consequences on modern society.
Impressive designs veritas9, nice one! :)
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Setting MaxExtraPrecision to "to use as much automation as it needs to resolve numerical values" looks very interesting. It seems like it is being lazy, because the amount of precision needed isn't known until after the result is used (in this case the function that counts number of correct digits).

Any idea how this is implemented in mathematica?
uSwitch looks at UK's most popular mobile phones "ranked by deal popularity and sales"
http://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/mobile_tracker/

Just what does that mean? It doesn't seem those charts are backed up by number of devices sold, I see no count listed.
Movie extra rises to #8 on IMDB due to Reddit
Same issue, browser and hardware here. This is the error I see in my js console:

Uncaught Error: INDEX_SIZE_ERR: DOM Exception 1

Awesome idea and use of getUserMedia though.
Didn't work for me either (on chrome). I kinda felt like a moron waving my hands around trying to get it to work. Would have been cool if the camera was doing a live capture and would let me watch my moronic movements after a while.
There's a difference between a court delivering a judgement and this judgement being enforcable. I never said that the case wouldn't go to Canadian courts. Just because some foreign court says you're doing something wrong doesn't mean that your home country automatically agrees with that decision. Many countries (maybe except the UK) won't care that much unless what you did is also illegal according to their law.
Important to note, which the article does not, that substances which are gaseous at room temperature are chilled to liquid using excess energy (i.e., energy produced at night). These liquids are stored chilled in vacuum-insulated canisters. These liquids are then brought up to room temperature when needed, and their expansion into gas drives a turbine. Presumably, no external power sources (or only waste heat) is used to warm the gases.
Most hash-table implementations either re-hash or use an O(n) lookup structure. And replace "magically" with "a malicious attacker" and you see it does come up more often.
Underground: The Julian Assange Story
Is that any better than just multiplying by pi * 2^n and then shifting right by n?
The day I need to make this sort of power-over-interface trade-off for reading email is the day I stop using email.
Can someone elaborate on what he means with this line:

"But the conditions that make patent protection essential in the pharmaceutical industry are absent."
If you don't like offlineimap, why not run a true imap server instead? At home I have set up Dovecot + Postfix. I pull in all my remote mail through fetchmail and dump it into my own imap server. Works like a charm and it's not hard to set up.

I use Thunderbird + Muttator for reading from my laptop and mutt through SSH when reading from e.g. work. I can even read it from my Android phone and tablet.
IIRC, solar prices have been dropping at a rate of 7% per year. If that keeps up, and if the grid price remains constant, solar will eventually become cheaper than grid.

In 1992, would you have told me today's smartphones would be impossible?

If you only lose a few solar panels in a storm, and most of the panels on your roof survive, you may just use a bit less electricity for a while.
Since I stopped taking the iPad and laptop into my sleeping room (the old e-ink Kindle is still allowed in, with wi-fi turned off) I was able to normalize my sleeping pattern, sleep a full 7 hours per night and work out as soon as I wake up, feeling energized for the whole day.

Just the other day I took my computer because I needed to reply a rather longish email... boom, I couldn't sleep before 3am, on a Tuesday. Never making that mistake again.
Grr... I hope people attending his talk are better at designing sites than his personal web site there. The think where he makes all URL links, most of which are unimportant footnote links, be highly distinctive colored boxes with a brightly colored bottom border rather than an underline is distracting, annoying, and shows he doesn't really have much sense of good design.
Apple doesn't share its sales figures with any third party. misleading linkbait
1981-2011 : Scroll bar
Not trying to be a skite or a killjoy but we designed a tool very similar to this as part of a research project (for a usability project mind you) as part of a thesis back in 2003. We primarily targeted Microsoft Windows XP Tablet edition at the time, which is now arguably a dying breed. We found quilting wasn't a large area of interest but still, I'd be interested to see how it goes...
Python is most popular in areas that aren't switching to mobile.

To the best of my knowledge, few end users actually run Python. For desktop applications that the "average user" interacts with, Python is even less popular than Java/Swing. Can you name any popular Windows applications written entirely in Python?

The majority of people using Python are using it in ways that aren't going to be replaced by mobile devices any time soon. Nobody's going to replace Django running on a server with some other framework running on a mobile device. Nobody is going to throw away Blender and start doing 3D modeling on their iPhone. There'd be little point in making a scipy library for Android.

Python doesn't have to dominate every single niche on every platform everywhere to be successful.
Misleading title, iPhone 5 went on sale half way through the September.
I feel like he makes some serious assumptions in this article.
One that you need to put each service on a different server, and two that you need to connect each service to a different database.

For a small/medium/large/whatever app you can definitely host services on the same server and database. Just update the code/configurations as necessary if you one day move them.
Maybe someday I'll get around to expressing this idea in a more refined blog post, but here is the rough thinking for now...

Irrespective of whether one approaches UX using intuition/experience, or statistical methods, both tend to incur a flawed assumption: There is a single 'best' version of a product/app/website, in terms of the overall UX decision.

Consider AB testing, where x measures some objective result:

f(A) = x

f(B) = 3x

So the results show f(B) > f(A). As an example, in context this could mean site version B, retains visitors longer and results in higher conversions. Therefore, UX version B 'wins' right?

What's the problem here? Perhaps it should rather look like this:

f(A,B,C) = [Ax,By,Cz]

Forgive me if the notation is a bit unusual, but the idea is you end up with 3 different UX's. 3 'best' versions of the website, that are always live, simultaneously. Or if you had a bimodal preference group, you would end up designing 2 UX trees. The number of clusters or 'groups' does not matter, only the fact that clusters exist to begin with.

We need to move away from the idea there is a single 'best' version of an interface. More often than not preferences when batched together (in the form of a product, app or whatever), do not form a neat normal distribution, even if approximating that is convenient.

A/B testing so highly regarded because it works. As effective as it is, (if used right), I believe we can do better.

Malcolm Gladwell eloquently expands on this concept, using an example from the spaghetti sauce industry, with further detail. I strongly encourage you to check it out, if you haven't yet, it's awesome![1]

This same idea of clusters applies for taste in movies,books,foods, which faces we find beautiful and almost anything really when looking at a population. Taste in website UX preferences is no different.

So the optimal webapp of 2020, is one that automatically knows which clustering a visitor falls into and presents a version of the site that makes them most comfortable, based upon UX decisions that align well to his/her group.

The current approach in software tries to shoot for a middle ground compromise, and in addition using a settings or preferences panel that the user needs to tweak. This could be considered suboptimal as more effort is required from users.

Example: There is a reason that UI animation annoys me (and others), to the point I'm willing spend hours researching how to hack the O/S, in order to turn it off. Clearly however, there exists other groups for whom it looks good, and there is no issue.

Why these clusters/groupings exist at all could be a combination of differences in our neurocognitive functions, and the summation of experiences over our lifespans.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce...
Care to elaborate on that? I use Chrome on Ubuntu and have not noticed any problems since the update a week ago.
There are some interesting questions about economies of scale, etc, though.

If we figure an average American has a lead acid car battery and maybe a laptop battery pack, we currently have more lead acid batteries than lithium ion, certainly by weight, but probably also by total watt hours.

Tesla and Nissan might end up inverting that ratio in a market where they merely have to get the battery to beat the cost of gas; and if we get to the point where every American has an 85 kwH battery pack in their car, that's multiple days of average US electrical consumption (I believe average per capita electrical consumption is about 1.5 kw, and average per capita total energy consumption around 6 kw in the US).

Meanwhile, there's no path to pushing up volumes of lead acid battery production significantly. Maybe there will be a few old lead acid car batteries getting recycled after Tesla conquers the world, but if that's all we're relying on, those recycled batteries won't power very much in the grand scheme of things.
Statistics are derived from uSwitch.com, plus our network of mobile phone comparison partners.

Seems like its based on affiliate revenue and # of pageviews of the deals. uSwitch is a deals-comparison site.
Posner's positions, and the frank and open manner with which he expresses them, are a much needed breath of fresh air from a legal system that is all too esoteric. Especially with regard to patents.

Though not directly related to the position Posner takes in his most recent blog post, it's ironic to consider the fact that patents are filed not by the inventors themselves, but lawyers who represent them. To me, that begs the question of whether or not "someone of ordinary skill in the art" could actually replicate the invention disclosed in any given patent. In reality, depending on the invention, it doesn't seem likely that the inventor could even replicate her own invention using solely her patent as a guide. This is a result of patents that are too vague, too general, and too far removed from the actual technology they purport to disclose.

In his recent writing, Posner has chosen to make the point that companies use either defunct or trivial technology to halt innovation through patent litigation. Recently, the culprit has been Apple, but Apple is, of course, not alone. In the fight against patent bullying, Posner's conclusions are, for the most part, right on target.
I've worked in a few small organizations where the decision was made to build a new product using a service-oriented architecture. Not a single time did this prove to be a good idea. I now get instinctively wary of anyone extolling the virtues of SoA on a small team.

Here's what usually happened:

* Testing got slow. Rather than just running a bunch of tests with nose or pytest, you had to provision a number of services, sometimes on a VM or build slave.

* Testing got bad. Because services have enforced privacy, you can't test or mock their internal states, so you have a bunch of happy path functional tests but much less in the way of comprehensive unit and integration tests.

* Communication deteriorated. In a perverse corollary to Conway's law, our team struggled to maintain a system that didn't mirror its own structure.

* We spent a long time re-implementing basics (auth, JSON serialization, parallelization), and less time building product. This was always justified to the product owners as a necessary short-term sacrifice, but it ended up being a long-term sacrifice too.

* Security failed -- distributed systems are harder to secure than monolithic ones, and most of the small companies trying to execute SOA don't have a clue about application security. The fact that they don't have robust implementations of common components available to them (because auth is now handled as a service, for example) doesn't help.

* Performance degraded: HTTP, JSON and TCP are slow compared to passing around objects in memory and pushing to the stack. They always will be. Most people forget that the database is more than a dumb repository of tuples, and thus end up reinventing the relational algebra in JSON—only with horrendous performance.

* Reliability was hurt. The idea that you have multiple services that can each go down without affecting the whole system is an absolute pipe dream. If the database goes down you can't do anything. If the web server segfaults, no one can see your site. End of. And things are far more likely to fuck up when you try to build a distributed architecture. You probably don't have the time or money to implement the correct provisioning or monitoring either, so when stuff does break you're gonna have a really fun time discovering and debugging it.

These are just my experiences from being on teams of a few people. In larger organizations I'd postulate that SOA is the better approach. But please don't fall into the trap of buying SOA before you've reached a definite need for it.
The U.S. Prison Labour Firm Whose Products Federal Agencies Are Required to Buy